The scribes had to work that bit harder to cloak the gratuitous flog-fest in some negligee of dramatic pretext, just to make the game that bit more fun.
Feig asked him to work with "the dealio," and the result was a triumph of gratuitous verbalization, the baroque and spiritless joie de vivre that characterizes so much of what passes as personality and office cheer.
It is gratuitous to toss away that struggle.
As most readers of this essay surely know from experience, anything that undermines that motivation pressure to produce, meddling by management, fear of sanctions, anxiety, resentment, even gratuitous performance bonuses worsens work performance.
For instance, a gratuitous reference to my work, along with Geoffrey Hill's, as "serious-minded to the point of pain and obscure of purpose" by Roger Lewis in the Times ("Say no to pompous professors") shows Lewis has conflated a superficial impression of Hill with a blurred and misleading one of me.
His gratuitous street work of the 30s claims the highest artistic ground, justly.
Gratuitous fight scenes are worked into the story, it seems, so that the older boys in the troupe can act out machismo fantasies and work in some of their skills, while death scenes all involve lolling tongues and flailing, gangly limbs that make the whole thing a farce rather than a dire warning. .
Presenting Mr. Lieberson in context with fellow composers was a promising idea, but there was something gratuitous about repeating works that had just been heard and calling the program a tribute.
More and more, it exploits gratuitous killing to an unconscionable degree.
